Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

infinitevalence writes "Every few months the good Viking programmers of the north organize and present one of the most geeky e-sports out there. Thanks to them, for three weekends in a row we get to watch player-controlled spaceships fight it out for accolades and unique in-game items available only to the first, second, and third place winners. This year CCP has all of the content live online and streaming in HD for your viewing pleasure. So find a drink, whip up some snacks, watch the shiny explosions, and listen to the soothing words of player experts as they walk you through the action!"

Did they got rid of wobbling? I'm somehow reluctant to turn those videos on otherwise.

Really, this was one thing destroying the immersion for me, when I watched EVE videos the last time - really nice views generally, but eventually some massive object showing up that inevitably wobbles when hit, when it couldn't possibly wobble like that. If you want to, have in the close-up view a visible blastwave going through the structure (could be merely approximate), jets of plasma and debris through ports of presuma

It can start small, just approximations. Say, an underlying gouraud shaded model, "visible" (normally quite dark) through transparent parts (of main textures) showing some "net" of structural borders and/or ports; when under heavy attack - lighting up a bit (gouraud...PS1 was doing it easily) in one of few predetermined fashions / sequences, representing waves of destruction expanding throughout the structure. Coupled with dozen particles spewing out of some predetermined locations; quickly lighting down an

It's funny watching the videos, because they look cinematic enough to be a news event but they're treated as a sports event.
I'm half expecting the narration to be in a somber, journalistic tone: ...and the alliance initiated hostilities, killing 10,000 civilians.
Then the sports commentator tone comes in: ...it looks like the scimitar ripped right through that battleships hull. The alliance is doing good damage to those ships. But they'll want to step up their game if they want more kill points.
It's kinda surreal in a weird way.

One thing that I find extremely irritating is how much TV time is spent televising sports - half the news programs here are about sports, there are many hours of TV time dedicated to sorts, not to mention whole free to air sports channels.After discussing this sad fact with my girlfriend just this weekend, we came to the conclusion that the reason why there is so much sport on TV versus say, coverage of computer games etc, is that of course sports events offer advertising agencies huge amounts of revenue, w

I think it's more of a cultural artifact than a reflection of the current state of our society. If look back some 20-30 years, internet was still in its infancy and sports were the only form of entertainment. The people who manage tv and cable networks probably came from that era, and therefore don't realize the strong impact video games have, or for that matter, a tv series with a decent story line. Eventually, they'll pass the reins on to a younger generation who view video games as a spectator sport. Thi

I'm surprised more game companies aren't taking advantage of streaming and even static online video. If you look around youtube, most of the game videos are "Let's Play's" or other fan material, not official content. Maybe they don't think it's worth the effort.

For many games, the "official" content has nothing to do with the best or flashiest plays. Starcraft comes to mind. Blizzard has nothing to do with nearly all high level play. Hell, all high level play specifically by passes Bnet ladder. The closest Blizzard comes to 'claiming' any high level play is the yearly Blizzcon tournament. Which is something that very few game companies have the size and clout to pull off.Really, the thing is lack of centralization. Aside from MMORPGs, game companies won't be able

I'm surprised more game companies aren't taking advantage of streaming and even static online video. If you look around youtube, most of the game videos are "Let's Play's" or other fan material, not official content. Maybe they don't think it's worth the effort.

Except that these videos become a useful recruiting tool. Both for potential customers that happen to stumble into the videos, and also for existing customers who want to show their friends without having to be at their own machines. What's easier? "Hey, I found this great game! Download a gig of stuff, sign up for a trial account, log in, find me, and I'll show you around.." or "Hey, I found this great game! Check out this video of actual game play! *link to youtube*"

I'm glad to see this. I've been playing EVE lately, but I just can't get into it. The things that make EVE stand out to me are the single player-controlled universe and the lack of XP grinding. But (and I'm not trying to troll, here) I find the user interface to be excruciatingly bad, and most of the time I am wondering what I should be doing. You could argue that a user interface and having a supply of fun stuff to do are two cardinal properties of a good game. It seems EVE is calibrated for players that h

I agree with you. EVE is a dull, boring game with a terrible UI. The only thing that makes it enjoyable is PvP if you're in a good corporation/alliance. It's not rewarding over short term. It's lots and lots of grinding for money so you can experience a battle for a few minutes and then you're back to 10h of grinding. It's hard to find a fair player, most of them will try to scam you in any way possible. Honorable players are rare. It's next to impossible to a fair fight. There are definitely great moments

It's lots and lots of grinding for money so you can experience a battle for a few minutes and then you're back to 10h of grinding. It's hard to find a fair player, most of them will try to scam you in any way possible. Honorable players are rare. It's next to impossible to [find] a fair fight. There are definitely great moments in game, but the amount of negativity is overwhelming and that is the reason so many people leave after trial runs out. Even those who have full accounts take breaks and often complain of boredom. It has a very low ratio of fun/"time invested".

I've played EVE for a while, and my major gripes is for the population of players, the game universe is too big. In addition to that there is no real way to interact with people beyond joining a corp/alliance that is active and political. A large portion of the low sec area are not even used, the resources are not valuable, and you risk being blown up by very experienced pvp players. Even learning to pvp is a difficult thing - there are so many things that you have to learn and know most of them not conveni

Lowsec is a problem. Sec hits + sentry mechanics + danger + low rewards compared to 0.0/wormholes = low population. There's no good reason to go there and it's very risky.
Learning to PVP isn't that hard. EVE University and Agony Empire both offer classes to anyone who can pay the (very small) fee. The UI should be easier, but it isn't by any means impossible.

I've done the Agony classes, and helped with the instruction (not in AGONY, just friendly and experienced). Their PVP-BASIC class is very basic, though you should know your way around the UI (Where the orbit, approach, warp, etc buttons are, how to fit a ship, etc).

It's lots and lots of grinding for money so you can experience a battle for a few minutes and then you're back to 10h of grinding.

Then you're doing at wrong. When your character is still young and you're still inexperienced you should be flying cheap crap. Especially if you join a corp(like mine) that specializes in pvp you can still make a contribution even in a simple rifter with a total cost of less than 1 million, and any corpmate can have a 100 of those for you in 2 mouse clicks.

One mistake a lot of EVE players make is to assume that bigger is better. Each and every ship in the game fills a particular niche, and the tournament shows this off quite well.

Still, in my line of work we sit on gates for hours waiting for someone we don't know is actually at his computer to undock his ship. I guess you could call that grinding as well;-)

Still, in my line of work we sit on gates for hours waiting for someone we don't know is actually at his computer to undock his ship. I guess you could call that grinding as well;-)

IRL, I used to fly hang gliders. The problem was the "hang waiting" where you sat on a cliff and stared at the sky for hours, waiting for the wind to turn. It was much like playing Eve: sitting at a gate waiting, like you say. The first few times it was exciting - a real battle, real money at stake. Then... time to go to bed. It's 3am and I just wasted my evening for nothing.

I'm glad to see this. I've been playing EVE lately, but I just can't get into it. [...] When you get a fresh WoW account you're off to the woods killing Kobolds or whatever right away, and maybe it is not totally challenging, but there's always something to do, somewhere to go, and pretty things to look at. But in EVE the first few *days* are mostly doing boring agent missions where you don't really even do anything (at least in WoW you have to click on the damned Kobold) except fly around and learn to use

Pure PvP FPS133 vs. 133 vs. 133 players per continent. There are several continents.No grinding, you fight for something and level up as a result.No economy, trading or currency (thus no gold farmers, no twinking, no gold selling, no economy to corrupt)Cert systems means no noobstomping and shallow power curve (my 6 year character can't just one click kill your 1 day character)Huge maps, but not huge in the same sense as EVE. You can get from anywhere to anywhere else in a few minutes

You mean I actually have to play the game? No, thanks. The only thing better than playing a MMORPG like Eve is watching someone else play it. Better yet, anyone have a live stream of themselves watching the live stream? Don't want to get too close to the action my heart may explode LOL!

Sadly the player "experts" are rather moronic this year. "Oh, look, that dramiel is trying not to die. Let's talk about nothing instead of analyzing the match." "He must be a master of orbiting." etc, etc.

Agreed last years commentators really knew a lot about the mechanics of the game and were able to speak intelligently about the tactics used. Yesterday one guy basically said I just fit the basic modules and go with it (paraphrased). They also had one of the most respected mercenary/pirate corporations represented, 'Veto'.

If you don't play the game, the commentary is hilariously incomprehensible. If your drink is alcoholic, or your snack is pot brownies, that alone is pretty entertaining. It's also done over some sub-Skype crappy VOIP system.

I agree. I watched the commentary and I expected a lot more then just describing what I could see with my eyes.

Rather then describing the action, "Oh that Scimitar is taking damage." "The Scimitar is down."

How about why it is taking damage, what is being used to make it take damage, and how is it part of the teams strategy to go after that ship first? How about a description of the abilities? How about anything besides what a 6 year old could tell me by looking at the health bars?

EVE online has many critics with very valid points, but never in my life have I had a PvP experience like in EVE. I've been gaming for over 20 years and never before EVE had I had a genuine fight-or-flight adrenaline rush. The terror of combat and the thrill of victory are unmatched outside actual combat. I've since quit the game, but I always look forward to watching the 10 man tournaments.

For those of you unfamiliar with the epic scale combat can reach, I suggest you look at the EVE Dominion trailer [youtube.com].

CCP are doing their best to prevent the lag or failures of nodes when big battles happen. For one, you can send them a message ingame ahead of time saying "In system XYZ we will be attacking the other faction tomorrow." and CCP then dedicate a much stronger server for that time to this system. Then you can have battles of 500+ ships with moderate success. For spontaneous events I believe battles of under 200 do not cause much problems anymore.(apart from some lag)

Before last winter's patch, spontaneous 600-800 man battles were quite playable, and 1200 was doable with a reinforced node. However, something went terribly wrong with that expansion, and we now have crippling lag with even 600 on a reinforced node. The issue is causing a lot of upset amongst the game's space-holding contingency (who happen to provide the majority of advertising for CCP). It's an issue that CCP needs to fix soon, or they face a mass exodus of their veteran players.

And before before that spontaneous battles of 100 players were unplayable. Yes, it is a step back, but it's not like over two hundred people fighting at once is something to be sneezed at. Cut CCP some slack or just don't play the game if it's so bad. I'm sure dozens of new players will happily fill in the void your corp leaves after you go away in protest.

I've been playing a game called Armada Online (think Armada from the Dreamcast) for the better part of 6 months. Just a top down space MMO space game, Free ( as in beer) and the game is full of suprises. It has some nice features, decent customizability, great ( IMHO) PVP (team and solo) some entertaining PVE and Crafting ( which is both rewarding and oooh so disappointing). The PVP ( once you've gotten a decent understanding of the game/ship abilities) is quite intense, there is quite a bit of team work ne

My roommate just recently began playing Eve again and, naturally, tried to get me to buy into the game. However, every time I see clips or streams of the game I...I just...I....*SNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE*

In EVE, you aren't flying fighters, you are flying frigates, cruisers, battleships, and the like. You want EVE game to behave as though you were piloting a TIE Fighter when in actuality you are "piloting" the equivalent of Star Destroyers.

To dumb it down it's basically world of warcraft but in space. What I mean by that is you're constantly button mashing while you watch your model ship circle around your target shooting at something. When eve players talk about "skill" they're talking about it in the same sense as WoW players do, knowing when to mash the right buttons and when to run away.

If you go in thinking this is a game of flying or shooting skill similar to elite prepare to be disappointed.

To dumb it down it's basically world of warcraft but in space. What I mean by that is you're constantly button mashing while you watch your model ship circle around your target shooting at something. When eve players talk about "skill" they're talking about it in the same sense as WoW players do...

Hardly. In Eve you'll notice a lot of combat involves ships circling around each other in orbits whereas in WOW tournaments the arenas are close combat and involve line-of-sight tactics. ExampleSK Gaming vs TSG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFo2yObhOS0 [youtube.com] (HD video)

What I mean by that is you're constantly button mashing while you watch your model ship circle around your target shooting at something. When eve players talk about "skill" they're talking about it in the same sense as WoW players do, knowing when to mash the right buttons and when to run away.

Actually, no. When those of us who actually have it talk about skill we take things into account such as:

- Should I focus on trying to take him down asap or should I destroy some of his drones to reduce the amount of damage I'm taking myself?- What distance between myself and the target is the most ideal? This varies from ship to ship(and there's well over a hundred different ships) and loadouts.- Does he have any help coming in? Are any of the other people in the area interfering in the fight?- What is my opponent trying to do? Fight, flee, stall, what's going on inside his head?

Add to that managing the supplies of the various kinds of ammunition, the status of your own ship etc...and then consider that this is just for a situation involving 1 ship on each side and now extrapolate that to 10 vs 10 where ships take on specialized roles.

Ow...and one of the skills in EVE is to prevent other people from running away...heck, it's probably the single most important one in PvP;-)

Not only that, you have to figure in tracking speeds of your turrets, overheat status, engaging drones (and if you are using ECM drones, the ol' "attack, withdraw" tactic that you constantly have to do), explosion velocities, getting webbed/ scrammed, etc. If you are a kiting ship, then keeping distance, minimizing/ maximizing transversal (depending on ship size), and manual flying are you're bread and butter. I convinced all my roomates to get back into EVE several times after deactivating their accounts

Replace drones with mages, ship with character and you've basically described every other MMO such as Warcraft Battlegrounds or even guild wars.

I know a lot of Eve fanboys modded you up but what I said still stands. The kind of skill you're talking about isn't flying a ship, it's communicating, assessing a situation and applying tactics which you have to do in every game.

If you want a first-person dogfighting multi-player space game, my first suggestion would be (free)Allegiance (http://freeallegiance.org) which, while not actually an MMO (the world isn't persistent), is an incredibly strategic and tactical experience where an individual game or match can involve over a hundred players and last for hours. Dogfighting skill is definitely critical in Allegiance, and you're not generally fighting NPCs - aside from fixed defense turrets, all armed units are manned by at least o

Newsworthy, because this time they stream also the qualifier rounds live (again), whereas last tournament, they put those on YouTube the day later and only showed the final round live. Also newsworthy: (working) HD stream this time.

When you die, you lose your ship right? What on earth would compel a team to enter a tournament unless they were sure they were in range of the top 4 spots?
How isolated are these tournaments? Can random people just fly in and start messing stuff up? Can you run away if you're about to be killed?
What are the limitations of the team? What's to stop a really rich team from having a better loadout? Or a really big team? Can you have a large team of cheap ships?
How many human players are involved in a batt

When you die, you lose your ship right? What on earth would compel a team to enter a tournament unless they were sure they were in range of the top 4 spots?

Ships are not irreplaceable. If you play Eve, you WILL lose ships.

How isolated are these tournaments? Can random people just fly in and start messing stuff up? Can you run away if you're about to be killed?

The GMs move the teams to a specially isolated system where there is no way in and no way out. If you leave a certain radius from the center of the arena you are automatically destroyed. You can't return to the field after fleeing, so there's never anything to gain from running before doing as much damage as you can.

What are the limitations of the team? What's to stop a really rich team from having a better loadout? Or a really big team? Can you have a large team of cheap ships?

Different ships are assigned a point value, with a hard point limit imposed on each team. You can have a few expensive ships, q

When you die, you lose your ship right? What on earth would compel a team to enter a tournament unless they were sure they were in range of the top 4 spots?

The point of an alliance tournament is not to make a lot of money. It is to show yourself and prove yourself in the eyes of the community, to earn some respect and achieve something only a few people have achieved before. The prices for the top 3 are very high this time, but I am quite sure that the alliance tournament would not be less popular if there were no other prices than just the title itself.

How isolated are these tournaments? Can random people just fly in and start messing stuff up? Can you run away if you're about to be killed?

The arena is in an isolated area of space, unaccessible to normal players. Running away is not an option, th

These would be fun to watch if they had decent announcers. They are just saying "Team A is doing a lot of damage to Team B's (insert ship name)" and stuff like that. Even someone who has never played the game could look at the screen and tell you that. I wouldn't listen to a baseball announcer who just said "It's the 3rd inning, and the guy in the middle is throwing a ball at someone holding a bat. Look! He hit it! Now the scoreboard shows Team A scored."

Instead, they need to be informed of the loadouts ahead of time so they can say "Team A is using speed tanking to prevent missile damage by the (insert ship type here). This loadout is weak against smart bombs but works great against Team B's choice of long range missile damage."

I haven't played in years, and it is hard to make the action of a bunch of icons interesting without someone giving relevant background. It's too bad: the game is so highly tactical it really would add a lot of value to have people who know what they are talking about.

Too bad they're not showing the hundreds or even thousands of hours worth of mining that went into making the largest ships.

Or the 2 years worth of subscription that went into getting the ability to pilot the more advanced ones (learning skills is on a clock using real life time).

Yes, I've played EVE in the past: left when I came to the conclusion it's too much like work, only slower.

EVE has a lot of grassroots advertising above and beyond what it's size would seem to justify because it is fun for the small group you've been there for a long time and belong to one of the player Alliances that control the space with the rarest minerals. It's not really fun for newer players - addictive perhaps, but not fun.

Because of how skills are learned over a period using real-life time (u need not be logged-in for the time to count) a new player can never catch up on an older player.Also the economy is based around the mining of minerals (used for making ships), the most common (least valueable and used in larger quantities for ship making) are found in safe NPC controlled space while the least common are found only in player controlled space (where if you don't belong to the right group you'll be shot on sight).

Somebody has to spend hours and hours mining all those low level minerals needed for making the largest ships for the players in those player Alliances that control "unsafe" space and who beter than newer players (who cannot go outside safe space without being shot) who are suppose to "work" before they get to have fun in PvP?

It is in the best interest of the estabilished players to get as much fresh meat as possible into the game to do the mining.

If you have several years of EVE under your belt and are in a player Alliance you're probably having some fun fights once in a while (a lot of time is wasted in other things and you still have to do some mining of higher level minerals), but if you're not one of those then the game is much lot less interesting than the fanboys portray it.

Because of how skills are learned over a period using real-life time (u need not be logged-in for the time to count) a new player can never catch up on an older player.

This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of EVE game mechanics. It's either complete ignorance or pure slander.

All skills in EVE are on a 1 to 5 scale. For example you can train Large Projectile Turrets to level 5 in a month. You can train it to 4 in about 6 days. Training from 1 to 4 takes 20% of the time as training from 1 to 5. In 20% of the time you can be 80% as good as that multi-year player.

This isn't a traditional MMPOG like progression where a level 30 is completely incapable of touching a level 60. A one month old character can take out a multi-year player no problem.

Old characters aren't better they're simply more versatile. Say you can max your projectile skills in 4 months. They're maxed. They don't get any better. If you're 4 months old with maxed projectile and they're 24 months old with the same exact projectile skills how exactly did you not catch them?

Sure that 24 month old player can also use lasers really well. But that just gives him options. It doesn't make him better. You have the exact same skills. You're just as good.